The Leap Manifesto made a big splash when it crashed the NDP’s annual convention last April. CD wants to keep it in the news and open up space for the Canadian Left to debate how it might be used to reshape Canadian and Québec politics. We have chosen to do this by asking a number of colleagues to respond to a wide-ranging essay by George Martell titled 'The Leap, the Left and the NDP,' published here for the first time.

Stories of bloody, degrading violence associated with Canadian mining operations abroad sporadically land on Canadian news pages. HudBay Minerals, Goldcorp, Barrick Gold, Nevsun and Tahoe Resources are some of the bigger corporate names associated with this activity. Sometimes our attention is held for a moment, sometimes at a stretch. It usually depends on what solidarity networks and under-resourced support groups can sustain in their attempts to raise the issues and amplify the voices of those affected by one of Canada’s most globalized industries.

Since Donald Trump’s electoral defeat of Hillary Clinton for President of the United States, liberal commentary has fixated on the problem of identity politics. Like the incessant tonguing of a sore tooth, this fixation locates a problem but doesn’t address it. It doesn’t even analyze it. It tells us nothing about the appeal of identity, attachments to it, investments in it. At best, liberal commentary (such as has appeared in the New York Times) repeats conservative criticisms of political correctness, glossing them with erudite condescension.

On December 1st, 2016, the Legislative Assembly of Ontario officially condemned the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign to end Israeli apartheid. Ontario Conservative MPP Gila Martow, who introduced the motion, likened the BDS campaign to the Ku Klux Klan. Both the Liberal and Conservative parties supported the motion; only five New Democrat Party Members voted against it. But, this isn't the first time that Israel's occupation of Palestine has been raised at Queen's Park.

Sometimes in this vast and complicated world, it's easy to feel a bit lost and hopeless. It can be hard to see progress or positives in the face of so much struggle. But I find if I focus things inward and think about the community with which I work to put renewable energy on the map, my mood changes. Drastically.

We've won the fight to end the discrimination built into the Housing Stabilization Fund (HSF). Starting December 15, as long as someone is on social assistance, they will be eligible for HSF. The City will no longer count people’s disability benefits (such as the Special Diet), Canada Child Benefits, and their assets against them when applying for HSF. The Toronto Employment and Social Services (TESS) announced the change at a City Council committee meeting on Tuesday, November 29.

For the sixth straight weekend, hundreds of thousands of Koreans came out in Seoul (and with other Korean cities estimates approaching 2 million people on the streets) to demand the resignation of President Park Geun-hye. These are the largest demonstrations in South Korea since the pro-democracy movement of the 1980s.

The election of Donald Trump marks an extremely dangerous shift, that threatens peace, democracy and sovereignty abroad, and labour, civil, social, and equality rights in the U.S. Facing this onslaught, working people in Canada and the U.S., and especially the trade unions, must organize to defend hard-won rights and standards, and to mobilize broad-based unity and mass independent political action in the streets to stop Trump and the ultra-right in their tracks. Unity of the Canadian labour and people’s movements with our counterparts in the U.S. will strengthen this fight in both countries.